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Have clinical trials for the Covid-19 mRNA vaccines found statistically significant and clinically meaningful benefits like preventing hospitalization and death?

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The clinical trials for the Covid-19 mRNA vaccines have been relatively small and short, and none of them have found statistically significant and clinically meaningful benefits like preventing hospitalization and death. For example, the largest clinical trials for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines involved a total of 72,663 adults and older children for an average of 3-4 months. After half of the subjects were randomly given a vaccine and the other half a placebo, 37 people died who received a vaccine, and 33 died who received a placebo. On a superficial basis, these figures suggest that the vaccines increased the relative risk of death by 13%. However, the death rate in both groups was so small (0.1%) that the difference between them is statistically insignificant. Nevertheless, the FDA has been approving these vaccines based on indirect measures called "biomarkers," a practice that medical journals warned against before the Covid-19 pandemic.



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